In 2012, everyone was worried the world was going to end. Needless to say, it didn’t, but that didn’t stop pop culture’s obsession with the apocalypse. In the hopeful Obama era, a world destroyed by humans was the stuff of fiction, and Dystopia Fever reigned supreme. It began with The Hunger Games, and continued with a string of imitators of wildly varying degrees of quality, including Divergent, The Giver, The Maze Runner, and more.
But in 2005, another book slotted into this genre before Katniss Everdeen was even a twinkle in Suzanne Collins’ eye. Twenty-one years later, it finally has the movie adaptation it deserves, and even though it’s set in the distant future, it feels like the perfect time capsule for a simpler time: the height of the YA dystopian craze, 10 years ago.
Uglies follows Tally Youngblood (Joey King), a teenage girl in a dystopia where all citizens are required to get cosmetic surgery at 16 to turn them “Pretty,” at which point they move to the idyllic City where nothing goes wrong, nobody has any problems, and everyone dances all the time. But after realizing how much her friend Peris (Chase Stokes) has changed after his procedure, she starts questioning the purpose of being Pretty — and the motivations of the glamorous but intimidating Dr. Cable (Laverne Cox.)
This movie has had a long and arduous road to Netflix screens. A first attempt at an adaptation failed in 2011, and it wasn’t until 2020 that Netflix acquired the rights and started developing it. Filming was completed by 2022, but hefty reshoots delayed it until now. And all those delays are not hard see in the final product.
Director McG, whose resume contains everything from Smash Mouth’s “All Star” video to Charlie’s Angels, trots out a series of glossy montages and sleek aesthetics, none of which can hide the clunky dialogue, simplistic worldbuilding, and questionable CGI. But despite all that, there’s something oddly comforting about the obvious way the story moves. The lines may be corny — “My story now begins in the past,” “Mirror, make me Pretty,” “Is that a (scandalized whisper) book?” — but they feel in on the joke, ticking every box in the mid-2010s Dystopian Movie checklist. There’s even the requisite teen-friendly cover of an older song, in this case, “Such Great Heights” by the Postal Service.
There are still some growing pains, of course. One of the main points of the novel Uglies is that every reader could interpret “Pretty” the way they wanted. Tally describes symmetrical faces with gold eyes and perfect skin, but the rest is up to the imagination. In the movie, we get a glimpse of what Pretty is from the get-go, and it’s just like a permanent Instagram filter that goes everywhere with you. It’s hard to be awed when this life-changing procedure just yassifies you.
But it isn’t until Tally escapes her society and retreats into the wilderness to find her friend Shay (Brianne Tju) that the biggest issue with the story reveals itself. Tally discovers the Smoke, a bunch of radicals who resist becoming Pretty and live on their own, and learns that there’s more to the surgery than just a deep condition and fillers — it affects the brain too, making all citizens perfectly docile and unable to think for themselves.
It’s a great villainous scheme within the story, but from the outside looking in, it’s hard for it not to feel icky: Laverne Cox, a trans woman, is playing the role of an evil mastermind brainwashing children into getting life-changing surgeries without them knowing the true side effects. It doesn’t take that much of a leap to turn this beautiful supervillain into a right-wing talking point.
But that’s just the 2024 talking. Outside of the context of the world it has entered into, Uglies feels like a retreat to a simpler time, where a normal girl in a strange, screwed-up society can change everything. And, thanks to the cliffhanger ending, there’s a chance we could stay in that simpler time some more in the future. The passage of time may be ugly, but anything can look pretty with enough nostalgia.
